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Learning by Doing: Labs and Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities

By The GPDH Editors | February 13, 2013

by Cameron Blevins

The digital humanities adore labs. Labs both symbolize and enable many of the field’s overarching themes: interdisciplinary teamwork, making/building, and the computing process itself. Labs give digital humanists a science-y legitimation that, whether we admit it or not, we find appealing. Labs aren’t necessary for doing digital humanities research, but in terms of infrastructure, collaboration, and institutional backing they certainly help. Along with “collaboration” and “open” (and possibly “nice“), “lab” is one of the field’s power words. With a period of accelerated growth over the past five years, world-wide digital humanities labs and centers now run into the hundreds. We overwhelmingly focus on labs in this kind of context: labs as physical research spaces. I’d like to move away from this familiar ground to discuss the role of lab assignments within a digital humanities curriculum. While reflecting on my own recent experience of designing and using labs in the classroom, I realized it spoke to many of the current issues facing the digital humanities.

Let me start with some background. This past autumn I taught my first college course, “The Digital Historian’s Toolkit: Studying the West in an Age of Big Data.” It was one of Stanford History Department’s Sources & Methods seminars, which are classes aimed at history majors to get them working intensively with primary sources. When I was designing my course a year ago, I decided to blend a digital humanities curriculum with more traditional historical pedagogy. Under the broad umbrella of the nineteenth-century American West, I used a specific historical theme each week (mining, communications, tourism, etc.) to tie together both traditional analysis and digital methodology. As part of this, over five different class periods students met in the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis to complete a weekly lab assignment.

In designing the course, I wrestled with a problem that faces every digital humanist: the balancing of “traditional” (for lack of a better term) and “digital.” How much of my curriculum should follow a seminar model based on reading and discussion? How much should it follow a lab model based on technical tools and techniques? As is often the case, pragmatism partially informed my decision. Because my class was part of a required series of courses offered by the department, I couldn’t simply design a full-blown digital humanities methods course. It had to have a strong historical component in order to get approved. This juggling act is not uncommon for digital humanists. But more philosophically, I believed that digital tools were best learned in the context of historical inquiry. An overarching theme (in my case, the late nineteenth-century West) helped answer the question of why a student was learning a particular piece of software. Without it, digital pedagogy can stray into the bugaboo waved about by skeptics: teaching technology for technology’s sake.